Here he sounds indeed sweetly libertarian, since self-respect is one of the chief goods of a market society—in which it is not the munity that takes all care of us. He might have reflected, as Tomasi does in his book, about the self-respect that es from earning one's way. Minimum-wage laws that prevent people from working might undermine self-respect, by making unskilled people into wards of the munity. But Sandel, following his teaching plan of superficial philosophy bined with numerous unanalyzed and politically slanted examples, does not reflect.
andel is persuasive, admittedly, when he goes after thenaïfs of Prudence Only, especially my fellow Chicagoans such as the economist Gary Becker and the alarmingly productive federal judge Posner or the freakonomics writers Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner. Sandel is right that what is called "agency theory," which has taken over American graduate schools of business in the past forty years, is naïve in declaring that all we need is incentives, like trained seals. We also need professionalism and judgment and history and norms, as the bankers have recently learned. But going after the Chicagoans is like shooting fish in a philosophical barrel.
Yet Sandel offers no philosophical standard for the bankers or for his students. One can readily agree that buying grades in school or buying honorary degrees, or paying for a friend's advice or a hu**and's sexual services, are viewed nowadays by "some people" as immoral. But why exactly, professor？ Once upon a time all such things were for sale. In the European Middle Ages one could buy almost anything—wheat and iron, yes, but also hu**ands, marketplaces, kingdoms, eternal salvation. Sandel claims repeatedly that "market triumphalism" is a novelty. But that's bad history, albeit the sort that most people believe: that in olden days we were pure and fair, and now we are capitalist and corrupt. The golden age of allocation by fairness and disgust was not olden days but 1933-1968. Before 1933 markets ruled, in China and India as much as in England and Italy.
andel worries properly that the market can crowd out the sacred. A corporate market in, say, instruction in elementary classrooms can crowd out unbiased teaching about capitalism. Yet Sandel does not tell his own classroom that state schools can crowd out unbiased teaching about, say, the environment.
And what about crowding in？ A society in which goods are allocated by race or gender or Party membership is not obviously superior in moral terms to one in which prices rule. Sandel declares that "we must also ask whether market norms will crowd out non-market norms" (p. 78). But he provides no philosophical analysis of how we would answer the opposite crowding, as when non-market norms of Jim Crow in the Sandelian golden age crowded out the market norm that a black person's money is as good at a lunch counter as a white person's. A market society is by no means contemptible ethically, if one actually looks into the ethical effects and thinks about them. The French spoke in the eighteenth century of doux merce, the civilizing effect of markets introduced into societies of status or isolation.
What then？ This: Sandel has not treated his students and his readers morally. He has given them many, many examples tending, he thinks, to confirm their uncritically Progressive biases. But he has withheld from the students the moral philosophy that would allow them the dignity of an intellectual choice.
Over the front door of the late-medieval city hall in the Dutch city of Gouda is the motto of the first modern economy, the first large society in which merce and innovation instead of state regulation and social status were honored. It says, Audite et alteram partem—Listen even to the other side. It's good advice for a society of the bourgeoisie, and for a classroom for students of philosophy.
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